Microsoft and 343 have been typically tight-lipped when it comes to plot details surrounding Halo 4. But today, that all changed: The track-listing for the game's soundtrack was released. Oh yeah. You read that right.

Using the track names from the soundtrack, I have pieced together some highly precise (ish) predictions about the story of Halo 4.

The soundtrack, composed by Massive Attack's Neil Davidge, consists of musical compositions with awesomely vague and action-gamey names like "Nemesis" and "Arrival." You'd think it would be impossible to deduce a thing about the game before PR decides to tell us the story. Too bad they didn't take my amazing forecasting abilities into account!

It's no small thing, the Halo music. In fact, it's kind of a big deal. As I , Martin…
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Given that past Halo games' soundtracks have more or less followed the plot of the game, it didn't seem like too much of a stretch that the Halo 4 soundtrack would do the same thing. With that in mind, I have made some sweeping, 100% accurate and in-no-way made up (read: 100% for fun and basically totally made-up) extrapolations about the game's story.

1. Awakening

Master Chief's eyes open for the first time in a long while. You could say he… awakens. Presumably he undergoes some type of systems check where a computer voice asks him if he would like to invert the y-axis.

2. Belly Of The Beast

Chief barely gets his bearings when suddenly… there is an attack underway! Some sort of attack! Oh no! Or maybe they hit an asteroid belt! Or both! Chief must fight his way through the ship to reach Cortana, who has, like, been separated from him somehow. He finds her, and the two set their ship on a crash course for the mysterious Forerunner planet below. Maybe it's shaped like a halo. Maybe not. Let's say it's kinda oblong. It's called "Requiem."

3. Requiem

Chief crash-lands on Requiem and runs around in some big fields. Game reviewers everywhere will remark about how this sequence "Harkens back to the way I felt when I landed on Halo in the first game."

4. Legacy

Chief learns something about the history of the Forerunners. It's really confusing but anyone who keeps up with the ins and outs of Halo lore will be like, "I TOTALLY CALLED IT."

Let's say… the Forerunners were actually reapers all along. Or ghosts? Or maybe they were people! Oh yeah, that's good. A menacing voice calls out to Cortana, and she starts to wig out a little bit.

5. Faithless

After making that horrible discovery about the Forerunners, everything is turned on its head. Up is down! Left is right! Dogs and cats, living together! Etc.!

Um, some humans have gotten in touch with Chief, and they tell him something about the guys he's been fighting this whole time. There's a recurring character in there somewhere, one who didn't die in Halo 3. That character points Chief to a big ship or installation or something that he has to infiltrate to stop something. Cortana continues to wig as they get closer and closer to it. They fight a huge battle in front of the ship as a distraction, and then Chief makes his way aboard, or in, or up to it.

Oh, maybe it's actually the humans, who have secretly been merging with the Forerunner tech to become super-beings? Yes! That's totally who the bad guys are! Let's say that's it.

6. Nemesis

Onboard the alien/enemy/something ship, everything goes crazy. Craaaazy! Um, there's no gravity? Yeah, there's no gravity, or gravity is weird, so Chief has to navigate and shoot while floating in the air. It's probably pretty cool. A voice keeps calling out to Cortana, and she is really wigging out hard at this point. The voice belongs to some ancient power that threatens the universe, probably. A… NEMESIS, you could say.

Oh, maybe it's actually the humans, who have secretly been merging with the Forerunner tech to become super-beings? Yes! That's totally who the bad guys are! Let's say that's it.

Anyway, there is a pitched close-quarters fight against a bunch of enemies and at the end, a big cutscene plays where Cortana, exhausted from her continued wiggage, loses it completely. She actually more or less becomes the big bad, Willow-from-Buffy-style, and the ship they're aboard begins to make a second crash-landing. Bam, crash-landing, fade to black.

7. Haven

Chief crawls from the wreckage, and Cortana is nowhere to be found. Poor guy. Forever alone. He, like, finds a haven of some sort. Yeah. Maybe he walks around and some people talk to him, like in a non-combat game. Oh I know, a bunch of splinter UNSC troops have finally tracked Chief to Requiem, and have set up a camp since they want to help him out. So now he's part of a bona fide squad. Katee Sackhoff returns to reprise her role as "Space Marine #3".

But then the name of this chapter becomes ironic as they are attacked and Chief must wage guerrilla warfare in a level that doesn't look like the other levels of the game. A new enemy type is probably introduced.

8. Ascendancy

Chief fights his way into a Forerunner building to find out what's happened to Cortana. There's a computer, um, a computer there and it will tell him what happened to her. There are some new enemy types introduced again.

9. Solace

Turns out Cortana has some sort of robot-sickness that comes from her having been turned on so long. ("Turned on", you say? - Stephen) She's been compromised by the inner workings of the Halo, and she's in the process of like, merging with the Forerunners to lose her humanity. This is all being helped along by another bad guy. She appears to Chief in a vision, doing a sort of SHODAN from System Shock 2 thing, and Chief has to fight her minions a bunch before finding a map to the uh, mainframe computer that he can override to get her back. Wait this is a lot like Halo 3, isn't it.

10. To Galaxy

Probably a level with some space battles. Or maybe it's a fight to get aboard another ship named "Galaxy." Crystal ball is foggy here.

11. Immaterial

Cortana has spread through a bunch of computers and Chief fights his way to the big main computer he found in "Solace." She begins to taunt him about "who he really is" and promises some juicy/mean revelations about his true story. She downloaded them from his brain while she was inside his suit, or whatever. He fights his way to her, and they have a big showdown. Chief fights off a billion of her robot/etc drones, but it's not enough, and she escapes once more. This part is probably the hardest fight of the game, so later people will say, "You know, that mid-game fight against Cortana's minions was way harder than the final battle." Before she leaves, Cortana tells Chief something devastating about himself.

12. 117

Master Chief, "John-117," has learned some shattering thing or another about his past. Maybe he killed a child. Maybe he was never human. Maybe he had a sister, but that sister was abducted by aliens, setting him on his current Quixotic path. Maybe he used to be into tabletop Warhammer. Who knows. This music plays while that revelation unfolds. It is rousing and there are trumpets. There is probably a playable flashback. Maybe some slow-mo.

BAM. Back online, baby. Probably some asses get kicked.

13. Arrival

The evil dude's master plan is coming to fruition. Some big menace that has been approaching is finally here, and lands on Requiem. Chief tracks Cortana to a huge compound in the middle of Requiem. Shit is on. He comes in guns blazing, blowing away a ton of dudes before making it to Cortana. This time, there is no fight—some other kind of gameplay, maybe a vehicle chase, and he eventually finds her. But it's too late, she is dying. As she's fading away, with the world falling down around them, Chief uses some power he has, maybe something he unlocked when he learned that stuff about himself, to save her.

14. Revival

15. Green And Blue

Rousing finale where Chief fights his way off Requiem, with Cortana back but maybe still sick and/or maybe dying. He and some of the UNSC troops make it off the planet before it explodes or whatever. The explosion is super sweet-looking. At the end of the game, Chief is looking out a window at the stars beyond, thinking about the data they got just before they left, which points them towards 5 similar (and similarly dangerous) planets. There is a vast conspiracy at play, and enemies are lurking in every corner.

"It's going to be a long fight, but we're going to stop them," Chief says. Credits.

***

And so endeth Halo 4. Or heck, maybe none of that will happen, and the game will be all about some white-haired guy named Raiden sneaking around on an oil rig. Stranger things have happened.